Part 2

The monarchies created in the above fashion, by the combination of old patriarchal habits with military necessities, however firmly rooted they may appear at the start, carry with them a certain germ of dissatisfaction, which, under the influence of popular irritability, seriously endangers their permanence, and may at any time break up their consistency. The causes of such dissatisfaction are chiefly the following:--(1) The original motive for creating a king, the pressure of foreign war, as war cannot last for ever, in time of peace will cease to operate, and the instinct of individual liberty, which belongs to all men, unless when violently stamped out, will revive, and cause the subjection of all men to the will of one to be looked on with disfavour. (2) This feeling will be specially strong with the ἄριστοι, or natural aristocracy, whose individual importance must diminish as the power of the king increases. (3) A great danger will arise from the fixation of the order of succession to the throne. The natural tendency will be to follow the example of succession in private families, and recognise the right of the son to walk into the public heritage of his father; but the additional influence thus given to the king will have a tendency to sharpen the jealousy of the nobles. And, again, the son may be a weakling or a fool, and utterly unfit to play the part of a supreme ruler with that mixture of intelligence, firmness, and tact which the royal function for its fair and full action requires. (4) And if, in order to avoid these evils, the elective principle is maintained, either absolutely or within certain limits, the tendency to faction inherent in all aristocracies, stimulated by the potent spur of a competition for power, will be increased; and this factious yeast will work so potently in the blood of the nobles that they will either reduce the power of the king to a mere name, and change the government into an exclusive oligarchy, as in Venice, or they will even go the length of calling in foreign arbiters to heal their dissensions, which, as in the case of Poland, will naturally end in subjection to some foreign power; or, lastly, they will dispense with the kingship altogether, and return to their original mixture of aristocracy and democracy with more firmly-defined functions and more reliable guarantees. (5) This result may be precipitated by some outbreak of that insolence which is so naturally fostered by the possession of absolute power; the sacredness of personal property and the reverence of ancestral possession will not be respected by some Ahab of the day; some young Tarquin or Hipparchus may cast his lustful eye on the fair daughter of an humble citizen; and then will be unsheathed the sword of a Brutus, and then uprise the song of a Harmodius and Aristogeiton, which will sound a long knell to monarchy, during the manhood of a free, an independent, a self-reliant, and a self-governing people.

The system of self-government thus introduced, as the natural fruit of the elements out of which it arose, would be a mixture of aristocracy and democracy, with a decided predominance of the former element at starting, but with a gradually increasing momentum on the side of the inferior factor in proportion as the mass of the people excluded from aristocratic privileges by a necessary law of social growth advanced in numbers and in social importance. Greece and Rome, or rather Athens and Rome, present to us here two types from which important lessons may be learned. In both the discarding of the kings was the work of the aristocracy; but, while the germ of the democratic element was equally strong in both, in Athens, partly from the genius of the people, partly from peculiar circumstances, this germ blossomed into an earlier, a more marked, and a more characteristic manhood; whereas in Rome, in the most brilliant period of its political action, the form of government might rather be defined as a strong aristocracy limited by a strong democracy than a pure democracy, to which category Athens undoubtedly belongs. In both States the aristocratic element did not submit to the necessary curtailment of its power without a struggle; but in Athens the names of Solon (600 B.C.), Clisthenes, Aristides, and Pericles distinctly marked the early formation of a democracy almost totally purged from any remnant of aristocratic influence, at an epoch in its development corresponding to which we find Rome pursuing her system of worldwide conquest under a system of compromise between the patrician and the plebeian element, similar in some sort to what we see before our eyes at the present moment in our own country. To Athens, therefore, we look, in the first place, for an answer to the question, What does history teach in regard to the virtue of a purely democratic government? And here we may safely say that, under favourable circumstances, there is no form of government which, while it lasts, has such a virtue to give scope to a vigorous growth and luxuriant fruitage of various manhood as a pure democracy. Instead of choking and strangling, or at least depressing, the free self-assertion of the individual, by which alone he feels the full dignity of manhood, such a democracy gives a free career to talent and civic efficiency in the greatest number of capable individuals; but it does not follow that, though in this regard it has not been surpassed by any other form of government, it is therefore absolutely the best of all forms of government. All that we are warranted to say is, as Cornewall Lewis does,[9] that without a strong admixture of the democratic spirit humanity in its social form cannot achieve its highest results; of which truth, indeed, we have the most striking proof before our eyes in our own happy island, where, even before the time which Mr. Green happily designates as Puritan England, powerful kings had received a lesson that as they had been elected so they might be dismissed from office by the voice of London burghers. Neither, on the other hand, does it follow from the shortness of the bright reign of Athenian democracy--not more than 200 years from Clisthenes to the Macedonians--that all democracies are short-lived, and must pay, like dissipated young gentlemen, with premature decay for the feverish abuse of their vital force. Possible no doubt it is that, if the power of what we may call a sort of Athenian Second Chamber, the Areiopagus, instead of being weakened as it was by Aristides and Pericles, had been built up according to the idea of Æschylus and the intelligent aristocrats of his day, such a body, armed, like our House of Lords, with an effective negative on all outbursts of popular rashness, might have prevented the ambition of the Athenians from launching on that famous Syracusan expedition which exhausted their force and maimed their action for the future. But the lesson taught by the short-lived glory of Athens, and its subjugation under the rough foot of the astute Macedonian, is not that democracies, under the influence of faction, and, it may be, not free from venality, will sell their liberties to a strong neighbour--for aristocratic Poland did this in a much more blushless way than democratic Greece--but that any loose aggregate of independent States, given more to quarrel amongst themselves than to unite against a common enemy, whether democratic, or aristocratic, or monarchical in their form of government, cannot in the long run maintain their ground against the firm policy and the well-massed force of a strong monarchy. Athens was blotted out from the map of free peoples at Chæronea, not because the Athenian people had too much freedom, but because the Greek States had too little unity. They were used by Philip exactly in the same way that Napoleon used the German States at the commencement of the present century. DIVIDE ET INFERA is the politician's most familiar maxim, which, when wisely and persistently applied, whether by an ancient Macedonia or a modern Russia, will always give a strong monarchy a decided advantage over every other form of government. Surround me with a belt of petty principalities, says the despot, however highly civilised and however well governed, and I shall know to make them play my game and work themselves into confusion, till the hour comes when I may appear as a god to allay by my intervention the troubles which I have fostered by my intrigues.

So much for Athens. Let us now see what lessons are to be learned from ROME. And here, on the threshold, it is quite plain that the abolition of kingship goes in the first place to strengthen the aristocracy, on whom as a body the supreme functions exercised by the monarch naturally devolve. The highly aristocratic type of the early Roman republic, unlimited from above by any superior power, and with only a slight occasional check from a plebeian citizenship in the tender bud, is universally admitted. Plainly enough also it stands written on the face of the early history of the Commonwealth that the administration of the aristocracy was marked in no ordinary degree by all that exclusiveness, insolence, selfishness, and rapacity, which are the besetting sins of an order of men cradled in hereditary conceit, and eating the bread not of labour, but of privilege, "_das unverbesserliche Junkerthum_," as Mommsen calls them. To such an extent did they abuse the natural vantage ground of their social position that, while the great body of the substantial yeomanry, who shed their blood in a constant succession of petty wars for the safety of the State, were stinted of their natural reward and degraded from their rightful position, the insolent monopolisers of all dignities and privileges did not blush to take from the people their natural heritage in the public land, and, for the enlargement of their own order, to deprive the State of its stoutest citizens, and the army of its most effective soldiers. The irritation produced by this insolent and anti-social procedure of the old Roman landlords, by the law of reaction common to all forces, produced as its natural consequence a revolt; for, as it has been truly said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, no less true is it in all history that the insolence of the aristocracy is the cradle of the democracy. That happened accordingly in ancient Rome which Sismondi prophesied might happen in modern Scotland: "If the mighty thanes who rule in those trans-Grampian regions begin to think that they can do without the people, the people may begin to think they can do without them."[10] So at least the Roman plebs thought when, in the year of the city 259, they marched in a body out to the Sacred Mount on the banks of the Anio, and refused to return to the city till their just claims had been conceded and their wrongs redressed. Their wrongs were redressed: conferences, concessions, and compromises, in a hurried and blundering sort of way, were made; tribunes of the plebs were appointed, with the absolute power of stopping the whole machinery of the State with a single negation; and thus was sown the seed of a democracy destined to grow into monstrous proportions, and ripen into the bloody blossom of a military despotism by the hands of the very class of persons who were chiefly interested in preventing it.

The different stages of the battle between plebeians and patricians, or, as we term it, Whig and Tory, as they evolved themselves by a social necessity from time to time, belong to the special history of Rome, not to the general philosophy of history with which we are here concerned. The seed of democracy sown at the Sacred Mount went on from one stage of expansion to another, breaking down every barrier of hereditary privilege between the mass of the people and the old aristocracy, till it ended in the _Lex Hortensia_, passed B.C. 288, which gave to all ordinances passed by the _Comitia Tributa_--that is, the people assembled in local tribes and voting independently of all aristocratic check or co-operation--the full validity of law. And in this progress of equalisation between class and class in a community, the Muse of history sees only a special illustration of a general law that every aristocracy contending for the maintenance of exclusive privilege against natural right fights a losing battle. But the necessity of the adjustment of the opposing claims of a conservative and a progressive body in the State is a very different thing from the fashion in which the adjustment may be made, and from the consequences that may grow out of the adjustment. Here there is room for any amount of wisdom, and unfortunately also for a large amount of blundering. No man can say that the Roman constitution as it stood, after the plebeians had broken through all aristocratic barriers, was a cunningly compacted machine, or that it afforded any strong guarantee against that degeneracy into licence towards which all unreined democracies naturally tend. But one thing certainly was achieved. Out of the plebeian and patrician elements of the body social, no longer arrayed in hostile attitude, but fronting one another with equal rights before the law, and adjusting their forces in a fairly-balanced equilibrium, there was formed a great political corporation, deliberative and administrative, which for independence, dignity, patriotism, and sagacity, used its authority in such a masterly style and to such world-wide issues that it has earned from Mommsen the complimentary acknowledgment of having been "the first political corporation of all times."[11] This corporation was the Roman Senate, which ruled the policy of Rome for a period of 200 years, from the passing of the Hortensian Law through a long period of African and Asiatic wars down to the civil war of Sulla and Marius, 88 B.C.--a body of which we may perhaps best easily understand the composition and the virtue if we imagine the best elements of our House of Commons and the best elements of the House of Lords merged in one Supreme Assembly of practical wisdom, to the exclusion at once of the feverish factiousness and multitudinous babble of the one assembly, and the brainless obstructiveness and incurable blindness of hereditary class interests in the other. But there was something else in the mixed constitution of Rome besides the tried wisdom and the great practical weight of the Senate. What was that? There was, in the first place, the evil of an elective kingship--for the Consul was really an annual king under a different name, as the President of the United States is a quadriennial king, with greatly more power while his kingship lasts than the Queen of Great Britain; and this implied an annual fit of social fever, and the annual sowing of a germ of faction ready to shoot into luxuriance under the strong stimulant of the love of power. Then, as in the natural growth of society, a new aristocracy grew up, formed by the addition of the wealthy plebeian families to the old family aristocracy, and along with it a new and numerous plebeian body, practically though not legally excluded from the privilege of the _optimates_, the old antagonism of patrician and plebeian would revive, and the question arose, What machinery had the legislation of the previous centuries provided to prevent a collision and a rupture between the antagonistic tendencies of the democratic and oligarchic elements in the State? The answer is, None. The authority of the Senate, great as it was both morally and numerically, was antagonised by the co-equal legislative authority of the _Comitia Tributa_--an assembly as open to any agitator for factious or revolutionary purposes as a meeting of a London mob in Hyde Park, and composed of elements of the most motley and loose description, ready at any moment to give the solemn sanction of a national ordinance to any act of hasty violence or calculated party move which might flatter the vanity or feed the craving of the masses. But this was not all. The tribunate, originally appointed simply for the protection of the commonalty against the rude exercise of patrician power, had now grown to such formidable dimensions that the popular tribune of the day might become the most powerful man in the State, and only require re-election to constitute him into a king whose decrees the consuls and the senators must humiliate themselves to register. Here was a machinery cunningly, one might think, constructed for the purpose of working out its own disruption, even supposing both the popular and aristocratic elements had been composed of average good materials. But they were not so. In the age of the Gracchi, 133 B.C., the high sense of honour, the proud inheritance of an uncorrupted patrician body, and the shrewd sense and sobriety of a sound-hearted yeomanry, had equally disappeared. The aristocracy were corrupted by the wealth which flowed in from the spoils of conquest; they had become lovers of power rather than lovers of Rome; lords of the soil, not fathers of the people; banded together for the narrow interests of their own order rather than for the general well-being of the community. The sturdy yeomanry again, of which the mass of the original popular assemblies had been composed, had partly dwindled away under maladministration of the public lands, and partly were mixed up with motley groups of citizens of no fixed residence, and of a town rabble who could be induced to vote for anything by any man who knew to win their favour by a large distribution of Sicilian corn or the exciting luxury of gladiatorial shows; in a word, the _populus_ had become a _plebsy_ or, in our language, the people a populace. Furthermore, let it be noted that this people or populace, tied down to meet only in Rome, as the high seat of Government, was called upon to deal with the administration of countries as far apart and as diverse in character as Madrid and Cairo, or Bagdad and Moscow are from London. Think of a mob of London artisans, on the motion of a Henry George, or even a rational Radical like Mr. Chamberlain, drummed together to pass laws on landed property and taxation through all that vast domain! But so it was; and most unfortunately also the original fathers of the agitation which, at the time of the Gracchi, ranged the great rulers of the world into two hostile factions, stabbing one another in the back and cutting one another's throats, and plotting and counter-plotting in every conceivable style of baseness, after the fashion which is now being exemplified before us in Ireland,--the authors of this agitation were not the demagogues, but the aristocracy; as indeed in all cases of general discontent, social fret, and illegal violence, the parties who are accused of stirring class against class are not the agitators who appear on the scene, but the maladministrators who made their appearance necessary. Man is an animal naturally inclined to obey and to take things quietly; insurrection is too expensive an affair to be indulged in by way of recreation; and there is no truth in the philosophy of history more certain than that whenever the multitude of the ruled rebel against their rulers, the original fault--I do not say the whole blame, for as things go on from bad to worse there may be blame and blunders on both sides--but the original fault and germinative cause of discontent and revolt unquestionably lies with the rulers. Whatever may be said about Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, there can be no doubt that in the case of Rome the original cause of the democratising of the old constitution and the over-riding of senatorial authority by tribunician ordinances was the senators themselves, who, in direct contravention of the public law of the State, with that greed for more land which is the besetting sin of every aristocracy, had quartered themselves, after the fashion of colonial squatters, on the public lands, and refused to surrender them to the State till compelled by the cry of popular right against might, raised by such patriotic and self-sacrificing agitators as the Gracchi--patriotic men who attained their object at last by the only means in their power, but means so drastic that, like doctor's drugs, they drave out one devil by bringing in a score, and paid for the partial healing of an incurable disease by destroying for ever the balance of the constitution, and inaugurating with their own martyr blood one of the most woeful epochs in human history--an epoch varied by periodical assassinations and consummated by wholesale butcheries.

I said the Gracchi attained their object, and that by appointing a Commission for a distribution of the public lands, such as the friends of the crofters in the Highlands now propose for the repeopling of the old depopulated homes of the clan. But I said also that the disease under which Rome laboured was incurable. How was this? Simply because, whatever might have been the merits of the special Agrarian Law carried by the Gracchi, the violent steam by which the State machine was moved remained the same, the clumsy machine itself remained, and the materials with which it had to deal in a long and critical course of foreign conquest became every year larger and more unmanageable. It was not to be expected either, on the one hand, that a strong and influential aristocracy should die with a single kick, or, on the other, that a democracy, which had once learned the power of a popular flood to break down aristocratic dams, would cease to exercise that power when a convenient occasion offered. And so the strife of oligarchic and plebeian factions continued. The political struggle, as always happens in such cases, became a struggle for personal supremacy; the sanguinary street battle between the younger Gracchus and the Consul Opimius, though followed by a lull for a season, was renewed after a few years in more startling form and much bloodier issues, first between Marius and Sulla, and finally between Cæsar and Pompey. Such a succession of embittered civil wars could end only in exhaustion and submission; and this is the last emphatic lesson which the history of Rome has taught to the governors of the people. Every constitution of mixed aristocratic and democratic elements which fails by kindly control on the one side, and reasonable demand on the other, to achieve that balance of those antagonising forces which means good government, must end in a military despotism. That which will not bridle itself must be bridled; and when constant irritation, fretful jars, and cruel collisions are the bloody fruit of unchastened liberty, slavery and stagnation seem not too high a price to pay for peace.